Business
Is China Actually Stealing American Jobs and Wealth? (via Harvard Business Review)
No. This article reviewed the data for purchasing power, unemployment, bribery, piracy rates, and patent claims.
Why Is Every Streaming Service Using the Same Pricing Model? (via Harvard Business Review)
Customers now have several fragmented streaming services that have an all-you-can-eat model, which can be costly and delivers a great deal of content that doesn’t get consumed. Alternatives could be a metered approach, a good/better/best model, or one that gives discounts to incentivize commitment.
Leadership
Why Employees Need Both Recognition and Appreciation (via Harvard Business Review)
Recognition and appreciation are often considered interchangeable, but they’re not. Recognition is conditional (performance-based), past-focused (what you’ve done to earn it), scarce, and comes from the top. Recognition is about what people do; appreciation is about who they are. To show appreciation: listen, tell people what you value about them, check in with people you work with.
Do You Give Employees a Reason to Feel Proud of What They Do? (via Harvard Business Review)
Giving people raises is one form of incentive, but building up pride in their work and showing that it genuinely matters will lead to more exceptional behavior. The article gives several examples — grounds maintenance at Wake Forest University, customer service reps at Mercedes dealers, and employees at DaVita dialysis centers.
Starting an Engineering Management Book Club (via Software Lead Weekly)
As a faciliator of a book club myself, these are some solid tips if you’re looking to start one.
Process
Getting Your Team to Do More Than Meet Deadlines (via Harvard Business Review)
“It seems that we pay more attention to time when we feel like we have less of it. So when we feel busy, we are more likely to favor urgent, unimportant tasks.” The authors did a study where people were given guarded “proactive time” to work on important non-urgent tasks without distractions; the results were that people felt more productive.
WDR on team composition (via Software Lead Weekly)
Whether you have high-performers working together to find the best solution or low-performers working together to find any solution, they all find a solution. But it still matters how you distribute people. High-performers should mentor others and aren’t most useful on simpler problems.
Technology
When Algorithms Decide Whose Voices Will Be Heard (via Harvard Business Review)
As machine learning becomes more integrated with our daily lives, I expect to see more of these articles. Some pitfalls… using bad training data can repeat problems from the past, only optimizing for one variable discards anything that doesn’t fit the mold, having a decision made but not understanding how the black box made it.
3 Myths About Machine Learning in Health Care (via Harvard Business Review)
- Machine learning can do much of what doctors do. The aspect of providing care and treatment will be difficult with the human touch.
- Big data + brilliant data scientists are always a recipe for success. It depends. How was the data gathered? Why was it gathered? What are the limitations/problems with the data? Have circumstances changed?
- Successful algorithms will be adopted and utilized. If there is friction with your users, they’ll be hesitant to get on board.
MLOps, or DevOps for Machine Learning (via Software Lead Weekly)
Machine learning can benefit from some of the automated workflows and tooling (e.g., source control, build pipelines).